Agricultural vehicles come in various forms for cutting and harvesting crop material. Examples of modern agricultural vehicles include tractors, windrowers, and various dedicated harvesting machines (e.g., combine harvesters, cotton pickers, sugarcane harvesters, and the like). Often, agricultural vehicles are large-scale machines that carry and process large volumes of crop material while traveling over rugged off-road terrain. The loads carried on-board the vehicle as well as the loading to which the vehicle is subjected during operation require the vehicle to have a heavy-duty chassis.
Despite being of heavy-duty construction, the vehicle chassis will likely undergo significant bend-inducing loads during operation. Torsion loads can arise during operation, as can bend-inducing loads in the fore-aft direction (i.e., the longitudinal front-to-back dimension) of the vehicle. The fore-aft bend-inducing loads are often the result of rapid decelerations and accelerations of the vehicle as well as from driving the vehicle over sloped, terraced or otherwise uneven terrain.
As a result, the vehicle chassis may experience bending stresses during use. In particular, the chassis may be subjected to stresses from fore-aft bend-inducing loads in the areas between the front and rear axles. For example, in cotton pickers with a center-mounted engine compartment (i.e., located between the front and rear axles), such stresses may arise in the areas between the engine compartment and both the front and rear axles.